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MYSTERIOUS: Kleber mendonca filho - What They Never Told You

Why The Secret Agent should win the best picture Oscar

Kicking off this year’s series in which our writers advocate for one Academy Award nominee, our chief critic on why the Brazilian drama-thriller is the most audacious and fully realised film in the race

The Guardian - UK

The Secret Agent: gripping thriller reminds us why academic freedom needs protecting

Kleber Mendonça Filho’s The Secret Agent (O Agente Secreto, 2025) marks a moment of consolidation in one of contemporary Brazilian cinema’s most consistent careers.

The Conversation

The Secret Agent review – This Brazilian Oscar contender has the best acting you’ll see this year

5/5 Wagner Moura is Oscar-worthy in Kleber Mendonça Filho’s bold excavation of Brazil at the time of its military dictatorship

The Independent UK

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The Secret Agent review: Wagner Moura shimmers in this slippery epic of dark Brazilian mischief

5/5 The Civil War star is just one of the heady pleasures in a hypnotic thriller set during Brazil’s dirty decades

Evening Standard

Oscar nominee Wagner Moura: ‘I didn’t want to keep playing drug dealers. Latinos are way more than that’

THE SATURDAY INTERVIEW: The ‘Narcos’ star once faced censorship from Brazil’s then president Jair Bolsonaro, and is now the plucky underdog of this year’s Best Actor Oscar race. He speaks to Tom Murray about fighting stereotypes, the political importance of ‘The Secret Agent’, and violence in Trump’s America

The Independent UK

‘I’ve been advised not to say certain things’: The Secret Agent makers on Oscars, dictators and death threats

The actor Wagner Moura and writer-director Kleber Mendonça Filho explain how the Brazilian thriller mirrors their experiences of political corruption and why they are compelled to speak out

The Guardian - UK

For the Second Year in a Row, a Film with Latin American Themes Wins the Critics Choice Awards: 'The Secret Agent'

For the second year in a row, a film with Latin American themes has triumphed at the Critics Choice Awards, confirming a trend that can no longer be considered an exception. O Agente Secreto (The Secret Agent), directed by Kleber Mendonça Filho, won the award for Best Foreign Language Film.

Latin Times

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From California to Tehran, this year has been about the films that resist

Films such as One Battle After Another, The Secret Agent and It Was Just An Accident celebrate the importance of fighting back against oppressive forces

The Guardian - US

The Most Unconventional Noir Thriller Of The Year Will Take You By Surprise

Wagner Moura is magnificent as a political refugee fleeing an authoritarian regime in 'The Secret Agent,' one of the best movies of the year.

Inverse

‘I hope he goes to jail’: Brazil’s Cannes-winning director on Bolsonaro and political amnesia

Kleber Mendonça Filho’s gripping thriller The Secret Agent is set in the 70s but casts light on present-day politics

The Guardian - UK

Jafar Panahi wins Cannes Palme d’Or for revenge thriller It Was Just an Accident

‘Cinema is society. Nobody is entitled to tell what we should or refrain from doing,’ Panahi said

The Independent UK

Jafar Panahi’s Cannes victory is a wonderful moment for an amazingly courageous film-maker

Panahi has endured years of harassment from the Iranian authorities but has created a tremendous body of work; his Palme d’Or is richly deserved

The Guardian - UK

Iranian director Jafar Panahi wins Palme d’Or at Cannes for It Was Just an Accident

Panahi, long censored and previously imprisoned in his home country, took top prize as Sentimental Value and The Secret Agent also honoured

The Guardian - UK

Falling palm trees and a faltering Palme d’Or director: how Cannes 2025 went – and who will win

In a Cannes film festival where the greatest movies were about dictatorships and political cruelty, our chief critic shares his picks for the prix

The Guardian - UK

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The Guardian - UK

The Secret Agent review – brilliant Brazilian drama of an academic on the run in the murderous 1970s

Kleber Mendonça Filho’s study of a man attempting to escape corrupt politics is a tremendous, novelistic study of corruption in high and low places

The Independent UK

It’s the end of the world and the Cannes Film Festival does not feel fine

As much as the Cannes Film Festival basks in the Côte d’Azu sunshine, storm clouds have been all over its movie screens at the festival, which on Monday passed the halfway point

The Independent UK

Cannes, the global Colosseum of film, readies for 78th edition with new challenges on the horizon

Perhaps as much as ever, all eyes in the movie world will be on the 78th Cannes Film Festival when it gets underway Tuesday in the South of France

The Guardian - UK

Pictures of Ghosts review – Brazilian auteur haunted by his home town’s decline

Kleber Mendonça Filho offers a poetic but somewhat unfocused memoir-essay about place, cinema and time

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France 24

Cold wave hits southern Brazil with record-low temperatures

Unlike India facing intense heatwaves or France battling drought, Brazil this week has witnessed some of the most chilling temperatures ever seen in its southern states. Experts are not ruling out climate change and say that the extraordinary weather conditions are catalysed by the subtropical storm Yakecan.

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